


Impasto

by TiggyMalvern



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Do not post to other sites, M/M, Season/Series 03, free-ranging metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:01:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24611200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiggyMalvern/pseuds/TiggyMalvern
Summary: An AU take on Will’s journey through Europe in search ofhimselfHannibal. Or alternatively, an author has way too much fun playing with the many layers of imagery in the show.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 14
Kudos: 67
Collections: 2020 Eat The Rude Big Bang





	Impasto

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the organisers of the Eat The Rude Big Bang for putting their time and effort into arranging this event. Many thanks yet again to the ever awesome [DreamerInSilico](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerInSilico/pseuds/DreamerInSilico) for providing the beta.
> 
> And of course HUGE thanks to the delightful artist [whispers-in-the-chrysalis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RenJaegerjaques/pseuds/whispers-in-the-chrysalis), who once again selected my story to illustrate. It seems we have the same taste in fic 😊 Whispers generously dedicated her time to provide art for two stories in this Bang, and under trying circumstances that she most definitely did NOT sign up for. Thank you, hon, and I wish you much less stress next time around!
> 
> Whispers' [art post is here](https://whispers-in-the-chrysalis.tumblr.com/post/620462756004511744/once-again-ive-had-the-pleasure-to-be-partnered), where you can give her all your support and praise 💗

Impasto: a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on in very thick layers. Impasto provides texture, so that the final image appears to be rising out of the canvas.

 _‘Ruins are moments when things show themselves. A ruin is not a catastrophe, it is the moment when things can start again.’_ – Anselm Kiefer

*****

It comes back in the Norman chapel in Palermo.

Not the first time he’s there, in a space with a hundred candles and crowds of staring tourists, the whispered words and bowed heads of the devout. Not the second time, with tall screens and lines of uniformed police and the familiar white suits of forensics. It comes back the third time, when all that remains is striped tape and the alkaline stench of cleaning fluid amid a sea of yellow plastic markers.

It uncoils from the suspended, beating heart, dragging itself into some sort of form, the swords falling from its body with harsh clangs that resound through the vaulted arches high above. It’s mangled and incomplete, headless and blind, lurching across the floor in pained pursuit, and Will can only retreat in shuddering denial, horrified, fascinated, sweating and staring in the inevitability of it; he’s panting and falling, the cage of antlers reaching forward to enclose him….

“Will!” 

Abigail’s voice drags him from the vision and he’s half-sprawled over the steps before the altar, his breath ragged, his muscles racked by tremors.

The paper file has spilled across the floor, printed sheets and glossy photos fanning out across the marble.

The victim’s name might be in there somewhere, although given the state of the body, more likely it isn’t, not yet. It’s irrelevant either way. Who they were doesn’t matter – they were someone who was conveniently close when Hannibal needed supplies for his creation. The importance lies in what they became, their limbs precisely sculpted into a symbol, a declaration. 

Will wipes the damp from his forehead and eyes, strips away his glasses to see her more clearly. “He left us his… his broken heart.”

She stares down at him, her face twisting through emotions, a flash of what might have become a smile fast suppressed. “He misses us.”

He looks behind her, his lips parting as he sees again the image that was crafted there, because it’s more than that. The heart suspended on a pyramid of blades, the hilts supporting it against the earth. He lets his breathing settle before he speaks. “It’s the three of swords, reversed. A tarot card. Its meaning is overcoming grief, releasing pain. Getting over a bad situation.” His eyes drop, his mouth twisting into a bitter smile. “Or that you should be moving past it, if you’re not.”

“Reconciliation,” she says softly. “Forgiveness.”

“Sometimes.” He shakes his head. “Is Hannibal offering his forgiveness or asking for mine?”

Abigail sits beside him on the step; he can feel her there, close and warm, the certainty of her thoughts. “He left you a valentine. I think he made his clear already.” She pushes her hair back and smiles. “For a man who talks science over superstition, you know a lot about tarot.”

His eyebrows lift and his lips curl tight and slight. “When you make a career out of studying all the most creative killers, you learn a lot about the uses of symbolism.” Symbolism that involves weapons and heartbreak and rejection, classic motives for murder.

He looks again into the heavy, sucking space where Hannibal had left his message. “The three of swords reversed can also represent recovery from physical trauma, from surgery or ill health.”

Abigail tilts her head, hair sliding in a curtain across her cheek. “Well, you’ve done that part.”

Will’s not so sure he’s recovered. After eight months, the scar’s fully healed, but he feels its pull taut across his body every time he stretches or breathes in deep, a pull that’s vague through his muscles and sharp and bright in his mind.

He’s staring ahead, into the void, the image of what was there so clear in his sight. “I plotted against Hannibal, planned to arrest him, cage him. He stabbed me and nearly killed me. Does that make us even?”

“Even Steven?” He looks back to Abigail, her amusement at the phrase shining in her features, the V of her blouse delineating the flawless skin of her neck. 

They would have been even, Hannibal and him. It would have been fair, if Hannibal hadn’t… 

He knows then, he already knows, and it’s too hard to look any more. “He gave you back to me and he took you away.” His eyes move up to the frescoes, flicking over the surreal images splayed across the arched ceilings; paintings of another world, an imaginary world where gods are real and people get the life they deserve. “It’s Lucy and the football, he just keeps pulling you away.”

Maybe there could have been another ending. A different one, with a different choice, where they all left together. Maybe in one of those, it would have worked, the three of them. He could have made sure it worked.

His eyes are prickling and itching when he turns back to her, aching with possibilities too raw to ignore. “Where would we have gone?” In some other world….

She smiles wide and bright before she answers, all teeth and so very young, but her eyes are damp and blinking. “He said he made a place for us.”

And he has to watch, now, can’t ever look away as she starts to blur, shimmering and fragile in the haze of his unshed tears. “A place was made for you, Abigail, in this world. The only place I could make for you.”

He knows it’s coming; they both do. There’s a single wet trail of sorrow faltering down her cheek, and she’s trembling as the wound opens across her neck. She’s still and scared as the blood flows from her, warm and steady in a soaking flood across her jacket and her blouse.

He holds her eyes, staying with her the way he couldn’t before, being there until finally her lids stutter closed and he’s sitting alone in an empty church. Empty but for the striped tape and the sea of yellow markers.

His elbows rest on his knees, his hands suspended between them. Suspended like the tears that won’t fall. 

She’s gone, for a third time, and still they don’t fall.

The air smells of bleach and the candles flicker, and even his breath seems to echo within the endless hollow spaces. 

He didn’t tell her about the stag.

The stag died in the kitchen, its blood pouring free to mingle with his own, and Abigail’s. He watched it stagger and fall, groaning as its life drained away and the last of its breath heaved from its lungs. The final end of a mythical creature that should never have lived.

It’s back now. It’s flayed raw and shrunken, weak and stripped of its senses, a mockery of its former power and magnificence. It’s slow and unsteady, struggling even to stand beneath its own twisted weight.

But it is back. 

The image of the skeleton stares at him from the marble floor, cleaned now of the blood that had dripped and flowed upon it. Its fingers of bone nestle together before its ribcage, clasped in prayer. The skull isn’t bowed in supplication, though; instead it stares behind, over its own shoulder, watching and wary.

Hannibal’s vaunted skeleton prays, but it has no real faith that prayer is enough.

*****

He doesn’t stay in Palermo.

Hannibal was here, in the catacombs, and there’s so much symbolism in that, it almost makes him laugh. Luring Will down into the darkness, always drawing him towards death. Bodies carefully preserved and arranged among the flickering lights, tied in place with empty eyes, watching him stumble in the aftermath of Hannibal’s music while the conductor slips away yet again.

Hannibal will leave the city, so there’s no point in Will lingering either. Pazzi already knows it’s Hannibal. Someone else will figure it out, then the federal police will arrive, and Jack won’t be far behind.

Will doesn’t want to be around to meet any of them.

Pazzi asked him what he’ll do when he finds Hannibal. “I’m curious about that myself,” is what he said. 

It’s not a realistic answer.

He’s lost too much reacting to Hannibal, in instinct and emotion. Hiding from himself, from his truths, taking impulsive leaps instead of making decisions. He won’t repeat his mistakes. 

He won’t look for Hannibal again, not yet. He won’t dance to the tune of Hannibal’s choosing, the melody steering his feet in a pre-planned and predictable waltz. Not until he understands, until he knows what he needs to do. Until he will lead and have Hannibal follow.

*****

He knew almost nothing about Lithuania before he came here. It’s beautiful, at least in this north-eastern corner, a land of rolling hills cloaked in forest, a hundred lakes connected by a network of rivers.

He drives the winding roads and reflects that it must be great for fishing. 

He hasn’t done that since he was incarcerated. Only in his head, and not always alone.

He knew the country had suffered for decades under Soviet rule, and he’s not surprised to find the estate is an abandoned, overgrown ruin, the Lecter crest topping rusted gates.

Fall comes early in this part of the country. Half the leaves are already trodden into a wet, rotting carpet along the trails, but those that linger on the branches cover every hue of red and gold, an exquisite beauty brought to the world through their display of death.

Hannibal had said his parents died when he was young, his sister some time later. It would be unusual for a man of Hannibal’s… extremes to have experienced a stable, happy life. 

Her grave is one of the smaller ones in the cemetery, no ornate carvings or poetic words, only her name and the simplest statement of love. He trails his hand along the top of the stone, the chill of it seeping into his fingers. It was chosen to reflect her personality, straightforward and unfussy. A child.

The house at the foot of the outcrop is the only building he finds in good repair. The edifice on the hill above clearly hasn’t been habitable for decades.

“It’s not healing to see your childhood home,” Hannibal says, “but it helps you measure whether you’re broken. How and why, assuming you want to know.” They’re sitting in familiar leather chairs, separated by dead grass and bare, straggling undergrowth. Separated by distance, professional and safe, the way they’d been at the start. 

“I want to know.” He’s always wanted to know Hannibal, everything about Hannibal, whatever he might once have said to an uninvited guest in his hotel room over breakfast. 

He’s rarely seen Hannibal outdoors. A few times at crime scenes, a couple more at his own house. Mostly they’d met at the office, or Hannibal’s house, Hannibal inviting Will into all his own spaces, luring him always deeper into his world and into his mind. 

Hannibal sits here now exactly as if he were in his office, his legs crossed comfortably among the furnishings Will’s mind supplied for this conversation. No coat, no gloves, and no sign that he feels the chill in the mist-laden air.

Will’s thumb taps lightly against the leather of the gloves he holds. “Is this where construction began?”

“On my memory palace?” Hannibal’s lips thin as he looks over at the multi-turreted ruin, but he turns back to Will with a hovering smile. “Its door at the centre of my mind, and here you are feeling for the latch.”

Discovering that Hannibal was a serial killer hadn’t halted Will’s curiosity. It had actively enhanced it. “The spaces in your mind devoted to your earliest years… are they different than the other rooms?” He lets himself be drawn once again into Hannibal’s realm, the office in Baltimore materialising around them, familiar grey light seeping through the windows. “Are they different than this room?”

Is this room different now? Will sees it fractured with fault lines, as if through shattered panes of glass. They’re sitting separated by distance, as they had in a Lithuanian wood – he tilts his head and now they’re closer, the flaws in the lens shortening the gap, pulling them together, comfortable and intimate.

“This room holds sound and motion. A mass of overlapping memories too complex to fully disentangle.” The slightest twitch at one edge of Hannibal’s lips. “Impossible, perhaps, to entirely separate reality from a coveted fiction.”

Will looks around him, every detail of this room ingrained in his mind – the intricate patterns of the rugs, the colours in each row of books lining the balcony above – and the familiar comfort of the place is easing through his muscles. 

His eyes end their wandering to study Hannibal’s again. “Was there ever fiction here?”

“In fragments and insinuations. I believe the underlying truths always held.” Hannibal leans forward in his chair, the tip of his tongue emerging slowly between his lips. “Do you remember how it was between us, Will? How it felt to unleash our desires and indulge everything we wanted? We could live all of it again, every moment, whether inside this room or beyond it.”

Will remembers how it felt to flay the skin from Randall Tier, to peel flesh away from muscle and bone. How it felt to walk into the museum beside Hannibal, to have him lay eyes upon the elements of his design and recognise everything he saw. “On condition of murder.”

“No conditions, Will. I offered you that, if you recall. No need for a sacrifice, everyone left unharmed.”

Will’s mouth twists into the bitterest of smiles. “Almost polite.” He’d turned it away, without ever understanding what he was rejecting.

Forgiveness. 

The room shifts again and they’re sitting in the dining room, the fire crackling softly behind him, the ribs of the lamb stripped bare in the centre of the table. No fracture lines now, no disconnect, every reflection of light and crystal in the polished wood seen with perfect clarity. “You knew I didn’t kill Freddie Lounds.”

A delicate incline of Hannibal’s head in unneeded affirmation. “And with that knowledge, other facts emerged as uninvited certainties.”

 _Uninvited certainties._ Such a benign way to describe it, when the world collapses in a single instant, the shattering influx of awareness that months of friendship and care and _potential_ were a deliberately crafted web of manipulation and lies.

The knife dragged across his belly is something Will can wholeheartedly sympathise with. If he hadn’t been locked in a cage under constant watchful eyes, stripped of even his glasses as a potential weapon, he would have stabbed Hannibal with energetic, impassioned delight.

That Hannibal had known what Will did and concealed it, that he’d welcomed him to his home and smiled at him and served him dinner and extended his trust one last time – it’s almost the hardest part of everything. “You set aside those certainties because you preferred the alternative.”

“You’ve seen what hatches from the chrysalis, how wings unfurl and lift in the heat and light of the sun.” Hannibal tilts his head, a long slow blink between the words. “How much longer will you tell yourself the butterfly isn’t beautiful?”

There are hoofbeats in the hallway beyond the door, their rhythm steady over wooden floorboards. “The butterfly is erratic,” Will says. “Its path is unpredictable.”

Hannibal’s smile is slight, and no distraction from the enthralling intensity of his gaze. “So it is. But no less compelling for it.”

The shadow of branching antlers extends long across the room, angled in the light from the doorway. And then the air shivers and explodes around them, the house and Hannibal ripped away, and Will’s standing in a grove in a Lithuanian forest.

There’s a vibration in his ears, an after-glow of sound ringing with familiarity, and he waits for it to come again, shattering the stillness of the mist.

Gunshots.

*****

The woman’s not what he’s expecting to find, out here in a remote corner of Lithuania, among so much ruin and decay.

She’s certainly dressed like a Lecter, even if her ethnicity isn’t typical.

She carries herself with authority and confidence – nothing about her suggests a poacher, and she would justify the one habitable building that remains. He has the uncanny feeling she’s aware of him watching, despite distance and the advantage of binoculars.

Will’s the trespasser here, and she has excellent aim with that shotgun.

Better to stay out of her way.

*****

_Fall comes early in this part of the country_ , he reflects wryly, as the chill of the deepening dark seeps into his bones.

It’s been years since he spent a night outside, sleeping beneath the stars, and he’s thinking he might be too old for it now. And that it might be better if he’d come properly prepared, with a tent. The soft glow of the campfire does little to warm him and he keeps his hands encased in his gloves.

He doesn’t have to look behind him to know that there are antlers there, rising between the branches. The stag’s a part of himself – it will always be close, irrespective of whether he invites it into his circle of light.

He couldn’t have killed Jack. A good man and a friend.

He could have slipped away, leaving everything behind. His colleagues, his career, his dogs. 

That’s not so different from what he’s done now, but instead of being alone, he would have been with Hannibal and Abigail. Experiencing a new country together; forging new relationships together. Cooking and laughing and killing together.

_No conditions, Will._

Hannibal might even have meant it, but Hannibal’s influence is potent and Will is… susceptible.

He can relive it; the moment when he turns out the light and plunges himself into darkness, into waiting, anticipation prickling through every particle of muscle and bone. Randall Tier crashing through the window not as a man with a delusion and not as a predator with the teeth of a bear, but as a stag, the symbol of the wild hunt. A target, to be brought down and savaged by Will’s eager claws.

Hannibal’s thoughts don’t worm their way through Will, insidious. They soak into him like the Louisiana sun and settle beneath his skin, comfortable and warming.

If he’d gone with Hannibal, he would kill. To protect his family, to punish the guilty. There’d always be a reason, and Hannibal wouldn’t need to ask.

There’s activity in the bushes, the rustle of leaves, the snap of twigs as something moves among them, something large and heavy. Something strong and confident, no broken, faltering steps this time, and he swings the flashlight around, stamps out the fire that gives him away. He circles again and again, but he doesn’t see what he knows is out there, his watching stag.

The sounds have gone, the woods suddenly still and quiet. 

In their stead there are lights, first one, then another, then a mass illuminating the branches, dancing flashes of brilliance among the stark, dead landscape of the night.

Knowing what they are doesn’t alter their beauty, their near-mystical attraction, and his feet are already moving, leading him between the trees, through a stone archway so overgrown he has to duck beneath the hanging creepers. There’s a fountain, as desolate as everything else here, a central column and figure rising taller than Will, its basin filled with the leafless tangle of winter vines.

And with the source of his glowing companions. The concentrated damp within the confines of the concrete has attracted snails, hundreds of snails, the slow mucoid creep of the living, the coiled hollow remnants of the dead. 

“They’re like a living larder. A self-replenishing farm of food for the developing insects.” Hannibal’s standing just a few feet away, looking down into the miniature world of carnage and decay.

There’s a handprint on the edge of the basin among the lichens, tiny fingers the red-brown of long-dried blood. Will looks back up at Hannibal, curiosity scratching away inside his head. “Isn’t this one of the places you can never go?”

Hannibal’s eyebrows lift and his lips stretch into something not quite a smile. “I thought it was what you wanted. To take control. To go where you will and have me follow.”

Will’s not sure he wants that, exactly. He knows he doesn’t want the way things have been.

He looks away, his mind reassembling the half-buried glimpses of what was once a dazzling courtyard. “It must have been magical for a child, growing up among all this elegance, hidden within the wild brutality of the forest.” He can’t imagine this kind of life, this kind of freedom.

“Until the outside world intruded, until political rivalries wrought the same destruction on its human inhabitants as firefly larvae do upon these walled-in snails.” Hannibal’s peering down once more into the giant platter of molluscs, watching them crawl over one another in endless circles. “The snails could get out, if they wanted – they could crawl beyond the lip of stone and explore the vast acreage of forest – but they don’t.”

Will’s mouth twists at the edges, bitter with knowledge. “They feel comfortable and safe in what they know, despite the ever-present predator.”

“There are predators everywhere, in every level of this world.” Hannibal’s eyes are back on Will, unblinking and quiet. “The only difference is whether we choose to see them.”

There’s a smile tugging within him, impossible to resist as it seeps into the muscles of his face. “Some of us see them and invite them inside.”

“Many people do that, Will.” Hannibal’s voice is soft, a low rumble whispered through the mist. “Humanity saw the wolf and admired his strength and cunning, and then we brought him into our homes.” His humour fills his expression, as gentle as his words. “One might say it’s in our nature.”

“By the time he comes inside, he’s no longer a wolf,” Will says.

“The wolf adapts, the human adapts.” Hannibal’s head tilts, that perfect, minute movement that’s so unbearably familiar. “Is it possible for every predator to change to accommodate another, if it’s something they both desire?”

Will watches him with sore, tired eyes. “How can one predator ever really be sure what the other desires?”

There’s no answer, and there never will be, because Hannibal isn’t there anymore. Instead there’s sound out among the trees, real sound, not the hollow hoofbeats of his antlered shadow.

The woman – she’s left the house, winding her way along a trail by the glow of an old-fashioned lantern.

What the hell is she doing out here this late in the evening?

He follows her, creeping beyond her circle of light, watches her enter yet another damp, overgrown doorway. Waits until she leaves again, then lets himself inside, wondering what could draw her attention in the black of the night.

He makes his way down stairs of stone, infiltrated by the twisted roots of the trees above, down into a space of a hundred candles and a pervasive clinging chill. A space filled with yet more snails and the thin, crunching bones of birds underfoot. A space that echoes the catacombs in Palermo, but this isn’t a catacomb, because the man down here is still alive.

Naked, wasted and filthy as his hands clutch at a grate covered in hanging, makeshift dolls, but technically alive.

He was right the first time; she’s definitely a Lecter.

And then there’s the sharp double click of the shotgun being cocked – she’s right there behind him. He didn’t even hear her come in. 

There’s more than one reason he moved from active law enforcement and into the research side.

He turns around slowly and meets her eyes before he raises his hands.

*****

She feeds him information obliquely, and only in return for his own.

He tells her what Hannibal is, and exposes his scar. She doesn’t seem surprised.

She tells him she’s as much a prisoner here as the man locked in the basement. It’s something of a stretch, given their differing standards of comfort, but on a psychological level it might be valid.

There’s an obvious way to find out how much of what she’s saying she really believes.

*****

He releases the prisoner during the night. Waits in the woods until dawn fades the surrounding blackness to an overcast, pearly grey, when she goes to feed him.

He doesn’t go to look until after he hears her scream.

She’s sitting on a low stool, with her legs bent and her arms wrapped around her knees. Her coat and her cheek are splashed with stains, black in the cellar’s flickering half-light. 

She doesn’t look up when he walks down the stairs, but she’s lost none of her awareness. “You did this. You set him free.”

“It was you I wanted to set free.” He takes a few steps closer across the cracked and flaking stone. “I took him to the road, told him to leave.”

“You knew he would return to his cage. After so long, he had nowhere else to go.”

Will’s eyes wander the damp space around him, taking in the dirt and the spreading mould, the lingering relics of a time decades gone. He can’t honestly disagree with her assessment. “This prison became his whole world.”

She tips her head up to him then, staring, bitter and barbed. “Are you so different, returning to Hannibal, wearing his smile?”

Will pushes his tongue into his cheek, sweeps it along his parted lips. “I imagine that depends on what I do when I find him.”

Her eyes widen, a mocking curiosity. “What will you do when you find him?”

He breathes out air in a thin ghost of laughter. “You’re not the first person to ask me that.”

“Has your answer grown more satisfying?”

His eyebrows lift, rueful. “My ‘answer’ hasn’t grown at all.”

“Then neither have your reasons.” Her voice is sharp, penetrating, and his jaw tightens as he watches her.

“Did you know what he was?” She doesn’t answer, the silence of the cellar hanging between them, and he crouches beside her, already sure. “On some level, you knew.”

Mischa didn’t create Hannibal. His predilections are his own, and he would always have been an atypical boy.

The nuances of his actions, the details of his choices, those would be the parts shaped by his experiences. The experience of loss.

Her face dips, her accusations falling away with her gaze.

He uses his knife to strip the cork from one of the many bottles of wine. She takes it and drinks from it, her head tipped back, her hands trembling around the bottle. The translucent glass and its liquid content glow golden with the light of the candles.

He sits alongside her, the filthy, bearded face of the dead man staring up at them from his dark pool of blood. 

She sets the bottle on the floor, deliberate, beyond his reach, then stands and collects her shotgun from one of the scattered pieces of furniture. 

She holds it angled down, as she should, but down is pointed right at him. 

He doesn’t move. She was telling the truth. Self-defence is her reason, not her validation. There’s no taste for it in her.

“For Mischa.” The shotgun lowers further, to the battered stone between his feet.

She turns and walks away, leaving him sitting in the cellar. Sitting with a body and a thousand dusty wine bottles, and an image that expands through his mind, its wings spreading wide to dry, in preparation for flight.

*****

He lets himself back into the house. He’s almost surprised to find she hasn’t locked the door against him.

She’s immaculate, freshly clothed and wreathed in the scents of shampoo and soap, seated by the polished table. She sips tea from a traditional Japanese cup and peers at him from above its perfect rim. “You were down there for hours.”

“You killed him. You say I planned it.” Will lifts his eyebrows high and gives her a twisted smile. “Whether or not your prisoner really killed Mischa, Hannibal arranged for his life to end a long time ago.”

“You did what he would have done.” Her voice is flat, but her censure carries all the same.

“I need to understand,” he says. “Why he does what he does.”

“You understand him by becoming him.”

Will’s gaze sweeps upwards, beyond the high ceilings and ornate décor that would have blended so well into a house in Baltimore, and he gives a quick half-laugh of acknowledgement. “I made a whole career out of becoming and understanding killers.”

“Hannibal is more than another of your killers. He’s your nakama.” That word again. A part of him wants to reject it, but he couldn’t the first time she used it and he can’t now. The stag’s not visible in this room, but he can feel its presence, a long shadow cast behind him.

“For Hannibal, this man was… significant. He wouldn’t have wanted his death to pass unremarked.” And something in Will twists up tight at the thought of his disappointment.

She studies him with eyes dark and liquid, rimmed in black. “What did you create from him?”

“A flying insect, newly emerged.” He brings his attention back entirely to her, meeting her challenge. “He has wings to escape his prison now.”

She’s collected and still, not a flicker of reaction or expression. “I heard you smashing bottles. Does he glow in the light of so many candles?”

He gleams, radiant. Transformed from the wasted, desperate man into something ethereal. “Mischa might have thought he looks pretty.”

“You made a firefly.”

“I would’ve called them lightning bugs.” His childhood in the south supplied the name, but it’s not the name that matters. Mischa must have loved them. Kids always do.

“In Japan, they are hotaku.” She raises her tea to her mouth, her lips forming an exquisite seal against the cup. There’s no stain, no hint of colour lingering on the ceramic when she lowers it. “In poetry, they have been a metaphor for the most passionate love since the eighth century, in the manuscripts of the Man’you-shu.”

An imago. The image of a loved one. _‘Neither of us ideal.’_ “They can be a symbol of hope, or guidance in some cultures,” he says. “We all want to follow the light when we find ourselves lost in the dark.”

“Or they can represent the souls of the dead.” She arches one perfect eyebrow above the circle of her teacup. “Which were you thinking of, while you made him?”

He wasn’t thinking. He was only creating. Allowing his imagination to flow, to build, freeing himself within both their minds as his hands worked, the materials around him bound together in form and function. His ingredients included the shells of the snails – the food of the fireflies, and in Aztec mythology the symbol of transition, of time and the spiral of life, of reincarnation. Mischa’s killer transformed into something new, something resplendent, a luminescent icon that Hannibal would have regarded with awe.

“He will never come here,” Chiyoh says. “Never see what you made for him.” 

Fireflies emit their light, but there’s no heat behind it, no warmth to make it real.

“I know.” Hannibal left his heart exactly where he knew Will would find it. Will’s imago lies in a hidden world, to exist only in the basement of his mind.

“You’re going to look for him again.” She drains the last of her tea and sets the cup down on the tray with a gentle click. “I will come with you.” She’s not asking, she’s stating it as fact.

“Why?”

“I have my own questions in want of answers.”

A common cause, of sorts. Both of them with choices ahead, and lacking the information they need to make good ones.

 _You don’t know whose side I’m on._ His own words spoken to Pazzi, but they’d be equally apt now on her lips. She has few reasons to be loyal to Hannibal, and nothing to make her think fondly of Will either.

“How does it feel, to be leaving this place?” he asks. “To be free after so long?”

“I didn’t say I was free. You said that.” She rises from the table in a single smooth movement and walks to the doorway. She pauses within its frame, half-turns to look back over her shoulder, all shadowed cheekbones and waves of charcoal hair. “It’s important to you to see yourself saving people instead of seeing yourself as a killer. But you are no-one’s saviour, Will Graham.”

She’s gone then, her footsteps clicking deeper into the house, into places he doesn’t know.

She didn’t offer him any tea.

*****

When she kisses him, it’s one hell of a surprise.

It’s not unpleasant – she’s attractive, and he hasn’t, with anyone, not since… all of it. It’s a surprise, but she must have been alone a long time and she’s warm in the cold of the night and this is nice and – 

It shouldn’t be a surprise when she pushes him from the train. He should have known she was planning something; he should have guessed it was a ploy, when it’s a role he knows so well, but he supposes it must have been a surprise, because it happens anyway.

*****

He’s cold and he hurts.

Everything’s cold but for the warm breath huffed on his face, and for a moment he could be back in Wolf Trap with Winston or Buster or Zoe; but they’re gone, and he’s searching the world, alone, chasing after something else that maybe should be gone too.

He’s alone but for the stag, the long face and branching antlers hovering over the muzzle that snorts him awake. Nudging at him, pushing him, urging him onto his feet despite the pain and the numbing ice of the night.

Its legs are beside him, fur and feathers, dark and soft and solid, and he grips them to haul himself upright, the creature’s strength mitigating the wax and wane of the throbbing in his thigh. And maybe it’s the stag’s legs and maybe it’s the posts of a sign by the railroad tracks, but it’s one and the same now, because he’s standing.

The sky’s clear and the moon’s close to full. The rails stretch away into the distance, silver with reflected light, an endless path edged by the whispering blackness of the trees.

The stag looms above him still, head high and proud beneath its crown, eyes soft with understanding at Will’s battered state. No longer a repulsive mockery of itself, it’s fully restored to its former vigour, its nose brushing over Will’s curls. A creature of wild, self-possessed beauty and determination, controlled power and explosive potential.

When it’s sure he’s on his feet and stable, it turns and moves a few steps away. Looks back past its tail to check on him, before walking along the rails in the direction of the long-departed train.

The stag had pursued him to Lithuania. Now he will follow it back through Italy.

One step forward. Then another.

Every part of him aches, exhaustion dragging at his bones, but the steady hoofbeats of the stag are a constant draw, its form almost black against the pale of the moon.

“It’s a magnificent beast, Will.” Hannibal strolls alongside him, casual and elegant. This time he’s dressed for the conditions, long winter coat and black leather gloves. Like he intends to stay.

Of course Hannibal can see the stag; they exist together in Will’s head. 

Will doesn’t answer. It’s effort enough just to walk, to keep the rhythm of his feet and not trip on the wooden sleepers between the rails.

“In Hittite mythology, the stag is a protective deity,” Hannibal says. “He’s often depicted supporting other gods upon his back.”

It’s all so very Hannibal, and too much for Will to resist – he would have laughed, if it wasn’t for the pain lancing through his ribs. “I’m making no claims on godhood, but I wouldn’t mind if he’d carry me right about now.”

Hannibal takes no offense at Will’s sarcasm; his commentary continues in the same, precise tone. “The stag has also long been associated with the thrill of the chase. A symbol of the hunt, through many cultures and mythologies, from Greco-Roman to Celtic.” His eyes have drifted sideways onto Will. “Does it thrill you now to be hunting me?”

Will curls his lips as he tilts his head Hannibal’s way. “When Christianity came to Europe, the stag’s association with the pagan gods saw it cast as a symbol of devil worship.”

The smile he gets from Hannibal in return is far softer. “And yet in the story of Saint Hubertus, it was a stag that triggered his conversion to a saintly life, when he perceived a crucifix strung between its antlers on Good Friday morning.” 

The image calls another to Will’s mind, a gesture, an offering from maybe eighteen months in the past and gapingly long ago. “You gave me Cassie Boyle suspended between a stag’s antlers.” Only half-understood at the time, the translation clear, but he hadn’t known the motivation behind the gift.

“And she gave you enlightenment.” Hannibal’s still smiling when he breaks Will’s gaze, looking back along the path of the rails to the creature ahead. “Your beast has the feathers of a raven gathered at his chest and along his limbs. In North American mythology, the raven is the creator, and the one who brought light to the mortal world, as the Greeks told of Prometheus bringing us fire.”

“He’s also a trickster and a bird of ill omen,” Will counters. “A harbinger of doom in a coming battle.” He wonders if the battle awaiting him may yet claim them both. 

“The Norse god Odin had a raven on each shoulder, and they would fly the world each day to bring him information, retrieving wisdom from every corner of the earth.” Hannibal stops walking and turns to look directly at Will. Ahead of them, the stag halts too, its neck reaching around, regarding them without judgement or question, content in its existence. “A plethora of meanings are combined within this one animal, Will,” Hannibal says quietly. “A complex tangle of ideas and imagery drawn from sources across the world. What do you see when you look at him?”

If Hannibal was real, if he was actually here, his hand would be lightly cupping Will’s face, his fingers sweeping back into the curls behind his ear. But touch would bring only the shattering of illusion, so Hannibal watches from unreachable inches away. He watches with curiosity and concern as gentle as the rocking of the ocean, and Will closes his eyes against the stabbing twist of pain.

He opens them again to look ahead, along the rails, to the stag in its endless patience, waiting for him to follow, waiting for him to stand again at its side. “Something I thought dead,” he says. “Beyond recovery.”

Hannibal leans closer, and Will feels the whisper of the breeze over his skin almost like breath. “Nothing is beyond recovery, Will. Not from the mind. Not from yours, or mine.”

Abigail is. She’s gone, always gone.

And yet she’s not. He brought her back, to be with him when he needed her. She spoke the words he couldn’t say, told the truths he didn’t want to know. Until he saw the stag return, and then he didn’t need that anymore.

The stag is his reality, his inescapable fact. An impossible, blended creature which exists despite all logic; it won’t stay dead and it won’t be banished by time, and the ache of it is heavier than the bruising all through his body.

“Not even when it should be,” Will whispers, and Hannibal is too much for him to look at.

He doesn’t need to see him, though, to hear his words. “Who decides what should be in this world? Must we always listen to the ideas of others or shall we make those choices for ourselves?”

_’The wrong thing being the right thing to do was too ugly a thought.’_

Will has no answer when Hannibal phrases his question that way. He’s not sure there can be one, nothing that fits every circumstance. 

Before them the stag tosses its head and snorts, its breath a swirling silver cloud in the ice of the air. Its nature is patient, but they have a long way to go.

The first hoofbeat sounds, echoing on the wood stretched between the rails, and Will’s foot moves with it, one step towards whatever comes.

The rhythm resumes, onwards into the west, following the path of the night across the land.

Hannibal walks beside him, because Will wants him there.

Temptation swirls through his head, through his muscles, through the skin of his chilled, abraded hands. The temptation to reach across the gap, to entwine their fingers and draw comfort from the physical contact, the comfort that always bled into him from Hannibal’s caress. But Hannibal’s not real and he can’t touch.

He can’t ever touch.

So Will only walks, and Hannibal walks with him.

*****

It’s no surprise, finding Jack in Florence. Somehow even less of one finding him at the scene of a theatrical murder. Discovering that the body is Pazzi is the very opposite of a surprise.

Will warned him away, more than once. Some people don’t want to listen.

Jack had talked convincingly enough of getting out of the game, of retiring, cutting away the cancer that would kill him and honouring Bella’s request. But Jack’s a terrier by nature, a tireless and persistent hunter; he gets an idea and he doesn’t succumb to distraction. It would have taken only the smallest push to set him back upon the trail, ready to chase, and there was no shortage of people in Baltimore and Quantico eager to push.

Will wonders vaguely whose push it was that worked – someone from inside the law or beyond it. 

He’s not interested enough to actually ask.

Finding Bedelia in Florence is a substantial surprise. He’d assumed Hannibal would have grown bored and killed her within a month.

Doctor Fell’s apartment is… ostentatious. The walls, the ceilings, the massive carved double doors and ornate marble columns. Everything in this room’s a statement, and its highly polished surfaces are scattered with a collection of vials and needles.

She lounges into the back of what’s probably a genuine antique chair, her hand trailing gracefully over the edge of its sloping arm. “My husband is a doctor. He’s been treating my condition.”

She’s calculated it perfectly. Intoxicated enough to be convincing, collected enough to remember her lines.

He’s starting to see why Hannibal might have found her intriguing enough to let her live.

He leans in close, each word emphatic, ensuring they have time to sink in through the fog of hypnotics. “I. Don’t. Believe you.”

She watches from the corners of her eyes, just enough of a smirk on her lips for him to know she understands _everything._

This apartment, the museum – it’s too much. All of it’s too much, nothing that might be expected of a man on the run, a man in hiding. Appropriating the identity of Doctor Fell when the real man’s image could be found online was hardly a long term strategy. 

Hannibal was only ever playing here; he was amusing himself while he waited to be found.

He waited.

Jack’s trying to prod Bedelia into contradicting herself while she’s drugged, but she’s only repeating her alibi with more slyly provocative embellishments. “You say my husband murdered a chief investigator. Where’s the Polizia? Shouldn’t they be questioning me?”

 _My husband._ The words slide from between her lips easily, casually. She’s been saying them that way for months.

They crawl beneath Will’s skin, leaving him with a relentless, prickling itch. He won’t give her the satisfaction of scratching.

“Don’t worry. They will.” Jack settles into the chair across from her, ready to continue the conversation for as long as he has before the Italian authorities come and take over. 

She’s not going to change her story, not with Jack in the room. If Will could get her alone, she might let something useful slip, but there’s nothing new for him here. 

He’s already learned what he needed to know. And with Hannibal gone from the apartment, he already knows where he’s going to be.

He makes his way silently to the door and lets himself out.

*****

Hannibal sits before the Botticelli, the brush of pencil on paper barely audible in the silence of the gallery. He’s captivated, enthralled, exactly as Pazzi described him. He’s older now, but his appreciation for the piece is the same.

Will sees him from behind; the soft fall of his hair as it used to look early in the mornings, free of any styling constraints. The sharp angle of his cheekbone, the irregular curve of his ear. Sees the slight, quick tilt of his head, because Hannibal knows he’s here without the confirmation of his eyes.

He sits beside him on the bench – close, but not touching, the slow movement of the gallery’s cool air palpable between them. Hannibal looks as bad as Will feels, his face scabbed and bruised, a couple of wider cuts that should probably have been stitched. Jack hadn’t exaggerated their fight.

He looks away to take in the painting, the icon of Hannibal’s unending fascination. Once acquired, his interest never wanes, as enduring as Will’s stag. As enduring as the figures gathered within an orchard glade.

Hannibal’s gaze moves over him, the slight twitch of a smile at his lips. “If I saw you every day forever, Will, I would remember this time.”

Will finds his eyes again, the shadow of a beard roughening the edge of his face, the same shade as the bruising along his cheek. He’s real this time, a physical presence, so far beyond the conjured apparitions of a wandering mind.

He’s bloody and damaged, and he’s beautiful.

Will can only smile, almost a laugh, the familiar comfort of their conversations swirling around him. “It’s strange, seeing you here in front of me. I’ve been staring at after-images of you in places you haven’t been in years.”

“We find ourselves together now in another of those places,” Hannibal says. “I was young the last time I sat in this gallery. Barely even a man.”

Will had found it impossible to envisage Hannibal as a child, before. He can see him now, small and helpless, battered mentally perhaps as much as Jack bruised him physically. 

His eyes fall back onto the painting, the fleeting innocence of the nymph Chloris, the image Hannibal had once recreated with death. “I don’t think you were a child for very long.”

There are crinkles deep around Hannibal’s eyes and his smile’s undeniable now. “What has Chiyoh been telling you, I wonder?”

“Not much,” Will says, considering. His shoulders are looser, all the tension leeching away. “More than enough. I gathered some interesting details from between her words before she pushed me off a train.”

“She’s not fond of unnecessary violence, Will.” Hannibal’s words rise and fall, the ever-present melody of his accent highlighted by humour. “You must have made her quite angry.”

“It seems to be a talent of mine,” Will admits. “I think she intended it more as a lesson in consequences than as a punishment.”

“Where is Chiyoh now?”

“I’ve no idea,” Will says easily. “The train was bound for Florence, but after the way we parted, I’m not too invested in seeing her again.”

There’s no reaction in Hannibal’s frame, no hint of worry. “She always knows how to find me, should she need to.” 

The simple confidence in Hannibal’s sentence reverberates through Will, an echo of understanding.

Hannibal trusts so very rarely, but when he does, he trusts entirely. He trusted Chiyoh to guard his prisoner all those years. He trusts her with his location, when he’s the most wanted man in Europe. 

He trusted Will, all those months ago, in Baltimore.

By sitting here, waiting for him, he’s still trusting him now.

Will didn’t choose to forgive Hannibal for the lies, for his incarceration. He’s not even sure he ever did forgive him – his desire for Hannibal grew in spite of it, but the resentment simmered there, festering and corrupt.

Hannibal offers forgiveness repeatedly – a dinner of lamb, a heart in a chapel. A seat in a public location where he could easily be surrounded by the police. Will matters enough for him to make that choice.

Will has no words and scarcely any breath, and Hannibal closes his sketchbook with a soft whisper of paper, folding his pencil within its pages. He studies the painting before them, drinking it in, absorbing the details his memory would never fully be able to hold, while Will only watches Hannibal.

“The Primavera was one of the first large-scale European paintings of the historical era not based in Christian mythology.” Hannibal turns back to Will, the full force of his gaze stroking velvet over Will’s skin. “Art purely for its own sake, for pleasure and beauty, instead of illustrating a sermon.”

Will’s lips tilt in amusement – no wonder Hannibal’s drawn to it. “Spring as the beginnings of hedonism.”

“The Roman gods weren’t known for their adherence to a strict code of morality.”

They did as they pleased. Seduction, rape, murder, life as a game, played with emotions and impulse and petty jealousies. “The myths imply no judgement of their actions, only a statement.”

“Chloris is transformed through her ordeal into a goddess,” Hannibal says, soft, almost reverent.

Will’s aware of his lips parting, hovering for a moment before he speaks. “Did she consider it worth the price?”

“Botticelli certainly believed so.”

The room seems to shrink down, the walls drawing ever closer until there’s nothing else here except the two of them, but when Will looks up, the Primavera’s still there, suspended before him. The goddess strolls through the grove in a state of calm, her face serene, which is more than can be said for the wide-eyed nymph. “He wreathed her in flowers, a symbol of life. And of funerals.”

“His devotion to her is near-palpable in the level of detail.” Hannibal’s attention has re-focussed on the artwork, his gaze stroking across the dramatic expanse of the canvas. “There are over one hundred and thirty different species of flora in the painting, all represented accurately enough to be identified.”

Will tilts his head, considering, and lifts his eyebrows. “I can only make out the oranges.”

“The pigments have darkened with the passing of the centuries. We can only imagine how lustrous it once must have been.”

“Isn’t that what happens to all of us?” He’s drawn back to Hannibal again, no masterpiece as compelling as the man seated beside him. “We grow darker with experience and time.”

“It happens that way for many people,” Hannibal concedes. His eyes find Will’s, coffee-gold and tender. “Others emerge from the darkness, their light no longer constrained, their most honest core displayed for the world.”

Fireflies and goddesses, all created from something less dazzling – a brown larva crawling in the soil, a terrified nymph who fails to flee. The goddess is immortal, the firefly lives barely a few weeks. Neither knows beforehand what their outcome will be, and change is never a choice.

Hannibal and himself and the painting – they’ve been together here for only minutes, and their meaning resonates through years. 

Hannibal stands from the bench, his sketchbook left to lie there, and when he turns to Will, his expression is shadowed and contemplative. “Shall we?”

Will pushes himself onto his aching limbs, breath leaving him in a slow sigh, and he echoes with the loss radiating from the man before him. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Hannibal takes one last look at the Primavera. After today, it’s unlikely he’ll see it in person again.

He walks from the room, and Will follows him.

*****

Hannibal knows the Uffizi well, its layout long familiar. He guides them through the secondary stairways to the ground floor, fewer people to stare at the bruises and scabbed cuts that mar their faces. The courtyard beyond the door is cast fully into shade by the low light of early evening in the fall.

It’s no surprise to see the stag waiting there, tossing its antlered head and snorting in the chill of the air.

The paving stones undulate beneath Will’s feet, worn down by the passing of centuries and the thousands who have walked there before them. They’re evenly matched, he and Hannibal, both of them freshly scarred, walking slow with an echoing give in their gaits.

His fingers twist around the handle of the knife, warm and smooth within his pocket. 

He’s surrounded on every side by rising columns, walled in by multi-storied stone, an unreachable rectangle of sky high above. 

Is he a prisoner in a cage, returning to what he knows?

The Hannibal walking with him is real, and strangely silent; it’s so uncharacteristic not to be wrapped in the steady flow of accented words. Will would have expected talk of imagos, of teacups and fate and circumstance, but there’s only the echoing emotion of his presence, this man beside him who settles over Will like a balm, even after everything.

_’Do you still want to go with him?’_

He doesn’t need Abigail to answer for him. The stag is his answer, returned to him after he watched it die, resurgent after he thought it forever quashed. His beast of passion, of obsession, of connection and something shockingly like love. His stag of protection, of the devil, or the wild hunt. His raven of ill omen, or the bringer of light and perfect knowledge. 

_’Everything that can happen happens. It has to end well and it has to end badly.’_

Which choice leads to which outcome? And will it ever be his choice, or only the inevitable consequence of change?

His thumb slides along the back of the blade, blunt and innocuous; the bite only comes when it flips.

The stag has stayed ahead, watching now from beyond the archway at the end of the piazza, antlers gilded by the glow of the sun.

If he uses the knife, his stag will still be with him. It survives any amount of violence, any number of betrayals. It doesn’t question or condemn. It only endures, and waits for him to follow.

Each single step takes them closer. Closer to the light at the courtyard’s end, and the busy street beyond. They stroll past the blank marble gazes of scientists and sculptors, politicians and poets staring down from their niches, every stride reigniting the fire within him. Every second soothing the drawn-out ache of sorrow and absence. 

His fingers uncurl from the knife and his hand slides free from his pocket.

They cross the piazza side by side, skirting the remnant puddles from overnight rain, and their hands brush with every step. The barest contact, but it repeats each time, and Will breathes slow and easy with the touch on his skin, because this time the Hannibal walking beside him is real.

The stag dips its head to greet him when he approaches, and he reaches out to acknowledge it. This close and face to face, it’s impossibly huge, its muscled bulk almost filling the archway – how could he ever have thought to ignore it? 

It presses into him, vibrant and warm, staggeringly gentle with recognition and acceptance.

The next time their fingers brush, Will’s curl around to squeeze the tips of Hannibal’s, a brief pressure that tingles over his skin even after it’s gone.

He and Hannibal pass beneath the arches, welcomed by the golden rays of the sun, and they disappear into the crowds.

**Author's Note:**

> It wasn’t my intention when I started this story – I really just wanted to delve into the many potential meanings of the ravenstag and other repetitive images in the delicious melange that is Hannibal – but it became apparent to me by about a third of the way through that what I was actually writing was the [Bad Connections-verse](https://archiveofourown.org/series/888945) take on the European arc. A world where Will was a little more deeply connected to Hannibal before Mizumono, and where he was a little more likely to accept what they are, both separately and to each other. So this fic is a belated, accidental sequel that also holds its own perfectly well as a stand-alone if that’s your preference. 
> 
> If you liked this fic and you’re on tumblr, I made it very easy to tell your friends! You can reblog [this post](https://tiggymalvern.tumblr.com/post/620459000513871872/my-entry-for-the-eat-the-rude-bang-challenge) to spread love and receive mine 💗
> 
> You’re also very welcome to come over and [ talk to me on tumblr](https://tiggymalvern.tumblr.com), I almost never bite!


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